Stephen Liu wrote:
Hi folks,
Would it be possible installing USB pendrive as Hard drive, running
Grub to boot?
I have been trying couple days making DSL 2.2b running on a pendrive as
a Hard drive using Grub to boot the device without success.
The motherboard supports USB-ZIP/USB-HDD/USB-FDD/SCSI/etc.booting. The
pendrive can be booted if install DSL on it as USB-ZIP running syslinux
as booting device but never work as USB-HDD. It also did not work
using grub to boot. I also tried booting SCSI option as a USB 2.0 PCI
Controller has been installed.
Advice and/or links would be appreciated. TIA
B.R.
Stephen Liu
I have configured a 256M USB hard drive as a bootable device, loaded a basic
linux 2.6 OS and able to get it to boot. I use the device as a loader to
configure computers that have no image on their hard drive.
Here is the link that helped me out the most.
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=2384956#2384956
The biggest issue with USB device is that to Linux it appears as a SCSI device.
You can get into a catch-22 situation where the device will boot to get the
image, but cannot mount the root filesystem even though the SCSI driver is
installed in the image.
The solution I choose was to build a ramdisk image (initrd) with all the basic
/bin and /sbin tools I need. This configuration allows me to:
1.Boot off the USB drive
2. Remove the USB drive once booted (now running in ramdisk)
3. Insert and mount a second 1G USB hard drive with the complete OS image
(.tgz) I want to install
4. Format the unformatted hard drive
5. Mount the hard drive.
6. untar and ungzip the OS image onto the hard drive.
7. Use grub (--no-curses option for command line mode without curses) to
install the boot installer on the new hard drive.
8. Unmount the USB drive and hard drive.
9. Reboot computer now running off of hard drive
Let me know if you have any questions.
I could post my USB image files if someone is interested.
Ken Cobler
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